Middle East politics and New Orleans City Council prove a volatile mix

Updated January 20, 2018 at 12:14 PM;Posted January 19, 2018 at 1:24 PM

New Orleans City Councilman Jason Williams, pictured in this file photo, will move to reconsider a resolution decried by the Jewish Federation as an effort to marginalize Israel. (Chris Granger, The Times-Picayune)

Update: New Orleans Mayor-elect LaToya Cantrell has issued a statement about the resolution, saying she will support reconsidering a vote that will take back the action on Jan. 11. You can read the statement in full here.

The New Orleans City Council is planning to reconsider a resolution it passed Jan. 11 that has inflamed the city's Jewish community and has left a Palestinian group crying foul.

Council members say they had no idea the resolution, which says the city should divest from companies supporting countries that commit human rights abuses, would be promoted as a victory for a movement that critics say is trying to marginalize Israel.

The resulting controversy has forced some council members to admit they did not know in detail what they were voting on. The council now plans the unusual step of reconsidering a vote on the resolution at a public hearing next week at which both proponents and opponents can comment.

At the center of the controversy is a movement known as "Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions," or BDS, which the New Orleans Palestinian Solidarity Committee has been pushing since April 2016. During testimony Jan. 11, one of the group's members said the resolution could be used to divest from companies like Caterpillar, which produces an armored vehicle for the Israeli military.

But council members and staff say they were caught off guard by the connections to BDS, saying the resolution's language didn't get into the geopolitics surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. After the resolution passed, members of the Jewish community were furious: The Jewish Federation of Greater New Orleans and the Anti-Defamation League harshly criticized the resolution and demanded it be taken back.

The resolution has sent City Council members scrambling to explain how it came about, and how much they knew before it passed. Mayor-elect LaToya Cantrell and City Councilman Jason Williams have come under the most scrutiny in the controversy, because Cantrell's office drafted the resolution and Williams introduced it.

Mayor Mitch Landrieu has also criticized the way the resolution was introduced, saying his office didn't know about it because it was introduced under a parliamentary maneuver that suspends the rules to pass the measure out of regular order.

Cantrell and Williams backing away

On Wednesday, Williams and Cantrell both appeared to be backing away from the Palestinian Solidarity Committee as pressure has mounted for a reversal. The resolution says the council has a responsibility "to avoid contracting with or investing in corporations whose practices consistently violate human rights," but in interviews after the resolution passed, supporters said it could be used to divest from companies with interests in Israel, but other countries as well.

The controversy has pulled the council into uncomfortable and uncharted territory. Their support of the resolution has alienated the city's Jewish population, whose members have been important sources of support for New Orleans politicians, as well as social justice causes.

But politicians like Cantrell and Williams, both liberal Democrats, also court a base that is supportive of labor, immigration and criminal justice reform advocates, some of whom fall under an umbrella that also covers the Palestinian Solidarity Committee.

The resolution that Cantrell and Williams supported, along with Council members Susan Guidry, Jared Brossett and James Gray, threatens to open a new rift, exposing the mayor-elect and the council president to an array of grievances that were hardly imaginable before the resolution came to a vote on Jan. 11.

Local boycott sought since 2016

At the surface, by all accounts, the controversy surrounding the resolution would have been difficult to predict. But there were a few signs that emerged in 2016, before the presidential election began inflaming anti-Muslim rhetoric, that the BDS movement was in the early stages locally under the guidance of the Palestinian Solidarity Committee in New Orleans.

It started with a New Orleans-based boycott of food products in April 2016. The news release described the beginning of the movement this way: "Activists will engage in street actions as New Orleans' first Boycott, Divest, Sanction (BDS) campaign against products made in occupied Palestinian territories."

Those products included two hummus products, one made by Sabra, and the other by Tribe Mediterranean Foods. Both companies had ties to Israel, the Palestinian Solidarity Committee said, and the boycott was being supported by two social justice groups: Stand With Dignity, a racial equity group, and the Voice of the Ex-Offender, which was led by Norris Henderson, an ex-Angola inmate who works in criminal justice advocacy.

The campaign called for boycotting grocery stores that carry those products, and for signing a petition demanding the City Council pass a resolution making it illegal to carry products that directly support the Israeli occupation. It is not clear what ever came of the petition.

Then came the election of President Trump. After the president enacted a travel ban on people from Muslim nations that Trump said had ties to terrorism, the Palestinian Solidarity Committee helped organize a rally that Williams said he attended with his son in January 2017.

Williams was also featured as a speaker. After expressing solidarity with the Muslim community against the travel ban, Williams said he was presented with a list of demands. In a video posted online, a speaker talks about the group's goals, one of which would become the eventual Council resolution: It would make sure, the speaker said, that "local funds do not support abusive human rights practices abroad and enacting a human rights policy screen."

Williams said he remembered the list including a number of things that "I've fought for as a lawyer and I've fought for as a council person."

He said he remembered telling the group, "I look forward to talking more about it."

After Williams committed to working with the group on local funding surrounding abusive human rights practices, the crowd broke into applause.

Cantrell was asked by WWL-TV on Wednesday (Jan. 17) what she knew about the group behind the resolution. "Um... I know that there were students -- I believe they were students -- that were at the council meeting, I believe, because I saw them when I was leaving," she told the TV station.

But Cantrell had met with the group to which Williams spoke, said Max Geller, a member of the Palestinian Solidarity Committee. That was how her office came to work with the group on drafting the resolution.

"It's disappointing she's not standing by her base that's been working with her on this for over a year and pretending like she doesn't know us," Geller said.

Williams and Cantrell were early supporters, group says

From the Palestinian Solidarity Committee's perspective, Williams and Cantrell had emerged as early supporters of an effort to get a resolution passed, Geller said. At a private meeting, Williams said, he was presented with a list of demands that included a signature line, but he refused to sign it because there were things on the list that he disagreed with.

"As I can remember, a number of those things were related to local issues," Williams said. "What was not on the page was anything related to boycotting or divesting from Israel or any other country."

John Pourciau, Cantrell's chief of staff, said the meeting Cantrell attended a year ago also included other social justice groups. Much of what the groups were all proposing seemed consistent "thematically," Pourciau said, with what Cantrell had worked on in the past.

But the proposal was presented "without the context of the pro-BDS thing in there," Pourciau said.

Geller doesn't dispute that the BDS movement wasn't mentioned during the meetings with council members. From his perspective, the Palestinian Solidarity Committee and other social groups didn't need to get into that kind of depth because the resolution never contained language that specifically referenced Israel.

"We had protests, we had phone-a-thons and at those meetings we told them these issues were important to their constituents," Geller said. "Getting the action and having it portrayed as a big trick is just not accurate."

Council taken aback by reaction

Williams said he was taken aback when, after the resolution passed, there were online news outlets portraying the resolution's passage as a victory for the BDS movement.

"I very ignorantly assumed this grew from President Trump's Muslim" travel ban, Williams said. "I've learned a lot and been able to piece together individual movements by this group since then."

Pourciau said that the resolution was always portrayed as being consistent with the Welcoming City resolution, which was passed in 2015. That 2015 measure is described as an official action making New Orleans "welcoming to immigrants and multicultural residents."

"The idea that the city should be making intentional decisions as to what it puts its money in," Pourciau said, "was based on the previous conversations about being a more inclusive city."

Looking back, Pourciau said, there should have been more staff review because Cantrell's office "was unaware of any potential issues that could stem from" the resolution.

Williams agreed, saying, "I really wish we had been a bit more thoughtful."

Pressure on Council growing

Geller and other social justice groups who supported the resolution are now seeing the controversy as growing into a larger fight that has drawn in the Jewish Federation and others opposed to the resolution. But Geller said he's now concerned that the fight has become an "ad-hominem attack."

"What I think is really happening here is after a year of pressure from grassroots community groups that represent both LaToya and Jason Williams' base, they have turned their backs on us and have bowed to pressure from powerful pro-Israel lobbying groups," Geller said. Groups that oppose the resolution "can't find anything objectionable in the bill so they have to object to who's saying it."

Other groups, like the Congress of Day Laborers, supported the bill because it was "clearly a human rights resolution," said Chloe Sigal, an organizer with the Congress. She said it would be "very disappointing for the Council to bow to pressure and walk back from this resolution."

But that pressure is likely to increase when the resolution is brought up for reconsideration next week. The Jewish Federation, which criticized the council for not providing adequate time for debate, will rally members to speak. Williams, who is a member of the Jewish Community Center, has talked to many of them, and he said he's heard from people angry that the council also spent time during last week's meeting praising the work of the Jewish community.

"We spent probably twice as much time praising the good work of the Jewish community, and then the meeting appeared to end in insulting them," Williams said. "There are a number of people who were hurt, who were insulted."

But Williams denies that a reversal would serve as an ad-hominem attack on the Palestinian Solidarity Committee, saying, "any decision you make in government is not going to make everybody happy every day."

"What happened Thursday only allowed proponents to speak," Williams said of the Jan. 11 meeting. "We need to at least put it in a posture where it's open and there's diverse input."

That means the pro-resolution groups will be there too, Geller said, and they don't plan on going away.

"Jason Williams made promises not only to the Palestinian community but to many other grassroots community organizations," Geller said. "I expect he'll be hearing from all of us at the next council meeting and the days leading up."